Spoiler alert: Chris Hemsworth is at his absolute physical peak in new Netflix movie Extraction 2. Never been fitter; never looked better.
Given the amount of time, effort and sweat that has gone into Chris Hemsworth’s body over the years – and the Google searches and phwoars it has caused – this is a bold statement. When has he not been in the shape of his life?
Luke Zocchi – a lifelong friend of Hemsworth’s – has been the man responsible for keeping the actor fit throughout his career. You might have spotted him in Hemsworth’s Disney+ series Limitless, or if you’ve ever signed up to Hemsworth’s fitness app Centr, you’ll find Zocchi dishing out all kinds of workout inspo.
Ahead of filming for Extraction 2, the pair realised the approach and the routines they had been using for the past decade needed a rethink.
“Thor required mostly aesthetic body work,” Chris Hemsworth told GQ earlier this month, “Whereas for Extraction 2, far greater athleticism was needed.” He turns 40 this year and what was being asked of him for the Extraction sequel meant a definitive shift in priorities was required.
“When we started it was more, more, more and harder, harder, harder,” says Zocchi. “But Extraction 2 required so much more of him physically with stunts and all the action scenes so his sessions needed to be based around recovery and really trying to look after him.”
Rest and recovery have never been a part of Hemsworth’s vocabulary, or gym routine, so in order to enforce such a change, Zocchi called upon Michal Novotný’s expertise. As well as working with the Czech Republic national team, he is a professor in the Master of Sports Physiotherapy at the European University of Madrid. To put it bluntly, he knows his shit.
Similar to other actors he’s worked with recently (Ana De Armas, Keanu Reeves, Liev Schreiber), Novotný’s approach towards Hemsworth was to treat him as though he was a professional athlete.
“He was like, You guys need to bring it right back. This man is not resting nearly as much as he would if he was a pro athlete, He's on set filming all day then he's trying to train at the end of the day,” Zocchi remembers.
For Extraction 2, the brief given to Novotný was simple. “He needed to not have such big muscles,” Novotný tells GQ, so muscle definition and a higher overall fitness were the goal, while paying great attention to a sore back that has hampered Hemsworth over the years.
Treating pre-existing injuries
The first thing Novotný got Hemsworth to do was manual therapy for his sore back. That involved exercises in the gym together as well as sessions in the swimming pool incorporating plenty of resistance bands work.
“Chris has lower back pain with increased muscle tension in the lumbar area. The muscles are built mostly with slow twitch fibres, which means they are ready to keep our posture straight all day. If you are working in the gym, you are giving them extra work, which increases their tension even more causing lower back pain. Chris needed these postural muscles to have complete rest from gravity and water immersion in a pool is perfect for this purpose,” Novotný says. “I needed to keep him in an upright position, with no gravity while working out core muscles and legs. Chris was standing in the pool with water up to his shoulders, while I was behind him creating resistance in his legs.”
Before any gym sessions, Novotný also spent about 30 minutes doing physiotherapy on all of Hemsworth joints, “which is the same that I'm doing with professional athletes,” he adds. Those sessions would finish with more than 50 different stretches for the whole body, which would take 15-20 minutes. “There was mostly a lot of core work for his low back pain together with muscle definition,” says Novotný. “But the main priority was to keep his lower back fit for the tough scene when he was doing a lot of running with a kid on the snow all day.”
Embrace change as you get older
With Hemworth’s discipline and hard work at Novotný’s disposal, the most important thing he had to figure out was rest and recovery times.
“When you see how professional athletes train at the age of 20 compared to 35, they need to program the resting time much more carefully,” Novotný tells us. “What we needed to do was make sure that losing muscle cells was at a minimum because when you go to the gym, you destroy muscle and as you get older it grows back slower, so it was important to factor that into the exercises he was doing day in day out.”
Hemsworth’s main cardio is surfing
“100% Chris isn't a big cardio man. He could surf for four or five hours but if you tell him to go for an hour run, he’ll really struggle to do it,” says Zocchi. Surfing is a great workout, and during filming for Extraction 2 in Europe, Hemsworth regularly flew to France so that he could surf. “It is a lot of paddling, so it's about having a strong back and activating a pulling movement that engages your lats. Then when you actually get on the wave and stand up, it's a lot of lower body legs,” adds Zocchi. “Chris is a pretty good surfer so he's not just getting up and cruising straight. He's putting in big turns so it's a lot of agility, a lot of core, and a lot of explosive movements.”
Intermittent fasting to lose bulk
After filming Thor: Love and Thunder, Hemsworth was keen to lose a lot of the weight he had to put on so he did a lot of intermittent fasting. “The 16-8 routine, where you don't eat for 16 hours, and you have an eight-hour eating window, comes down to portion control,” says Zocchi. “We've had a lot of success with it because it works for Chris’s lifestyle. There are also health benefits when you go into these bigger fasts when your body has time to have a break from food. Doing that also brings down how many calories you actually eat, making sure you're not in a surplus. The only problem is when you start fasting you can feel really hungry to the point you're overeating. Within two weeks you should be able to get into a rhythm and feel comfortable.”
Smaller, more defined biceps for the win
One day in the gym Hemsworth asked Novotný about the best way to work on biceps. Very well defined at all angles was the answer he got. “It's important to work biceps together with deltoids in a vertical position in the opening position,” says Novotný. “It's not to have a bigger biceps, but the opposite. Hemsworth wanted to have smaller, more defined biceps.” Zocchi says that this was a revelation to Hemsworth, as tiny tweaks to techniques enhanced the way. Nolotny made small but significant changes to Hemsworth’s routine. The first was to work the biceps not as an isolated muscle but as a muscle chain, either with frontal deltoid and abdominal or with lateral deltoid and lateral abdominal.
“I also wanted to improve the puntum fixum (holding point) of biceps on core muscles. Here the idea is to work biceps contraction together with contraction on core muscles. That means I put him into static core positions while working his biceps using weights.”
Lastly, Nolotny looked to work biceps together with legs in a dynamic core using three exercises: lateral steps + biceps unilateral, frontal lunges with biceps bilateral, and back lunges with biceps unilateral. These all involved using a resistance band between legs and another elastic coming from legs to arms for biceps.
How to actually get Chris Hemsworth arms
Short answer, you can’t. “I get asked all the time, How do I get Chris Hemsworth arms?” says Zocchi. “I don't want to rip anyone's dreams down as it's good to have those goals and those motivations, but I do the exact same workout as Chris and my arms will never look like Chris's. It's good to have something to drive towards but you’ve got to be the best version of yourself because everybody has different body types. Chris has got those fast twitch muscle fibres so when it comes to bulking up, he just eats more food and lifts more weights. He doesn't ever get overly puffy and overweight. It's just his body type and his genetic makeup. Everyone puts themselves against the next person but when you're doing these kinds of things there has to be an admission of ‘well, maybe I'm just not built like that.’”
Novotný agrees, adding that Hemsworth’s body structure, which is more mesomorph (code for body types with a naturally high muscle-to-fat ratio) means he has wide shoulders coupled with narrow hips, giving him that triangle shape of a body many pine for. “This is the best for sports because you gain muscle very fast and also you can lose weight very fast,” says Novotný.
That said, the cons of such a body type are less talked about but are equally as important – namely the fact that narrow hips means the centrum of gravity doesn't have much area, making a lot of the core stabiliser muscle workouts much harder.
Pushing yourself to the limit
One thing Hemsworth will never change as he gets older is giving 100% to every workout he does. In Zocchi’s words, he always “leaves it all out there.” Crucially though, as Novotný has instilled in them both, factoring in recovery sessions and embracing days off, is not only as important as the sessions you do, but it will also enhance the productivity of the workouts you do. “If you're going as hard as you can, pull-to-the-wall max intensity, one of those sessions a week is enough,” says Zocchi. “If you're doing it correctly, like that sick vomit crazy feeling, maxing out on things like the assault bike and the rower to push it all the way to the limit, then once a week is enough. If you can do one of those every day, you're not doing them hard enough.”
